He paid Willie Lyles to steer players to Oregon, most notably but not only LaMichael James, and hid the payments on the program's books by claiming they were for the purchase of scouting videos. The videos were of a laughably poor quality, not worth $25 let alone the $25,000 Kelly paid for them; and Oregon didn't even get the videos until sometime after the NCAA started to investigate.

Lache Seastrunk's recruitment was particularly unseemly because Lyles engineered a change in the young man's legal guardian to deliver him to Oregon. Seastrunk's mother didn't want him at Oregon; so he got the grandmother named his legal guardian, and she signed his LOI. Lyles claims Kelly knew and approved of the tactic.